Zelda: Breath Of The Wild Team Discusses Thoughts On Speedruns And Creative Freedom

Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild producer Eiji Aonuma recently sat down for an interview [...]

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Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild producer Eiji Aonuma recently sat down for an interview alongside director Hidemaro Fujibayashi to discuss all things Link and co. With so many attempted speedruns, and impressive ones with other franchises, it's no wonder it came up as a topic of conversation. But the team didn't just discuss those "gotta go fast" gamers, they also took the time to explain the creative freedom they had for such an expansive title, including shrine aspects, a truly open-world experience, and more.

When asked how they felt about people finding short cuts and physics skips (as in speed runs), this was the response:

"That was definitely one of our goals. That's totally all according to plan," Fujibayashi told IGN. "A big theme of this game was that there should be multiple answers, multiple methods, multiple ways of doing anything. All the dungeons, we wanted to make it so that the players would be able to solve problems in any way they wanted to without us even being able to know what they would do to solve it.

It had to be an environment where they could do things we couldn't predict if it would work. So we have a lot of fun watching the videos and seeing people do things that we didn't actually predict and things that are totally unique. So yeah, it worked out."

Which naturally led to another question - with the expansiveness that was Breath of the Wild - did it become overwhelming? Would they prefer a more linear experience for future titles? Aonuma-san replied, "You know, I can't speak to what other people, other companies will do in their own games, but I think for me, especially just in terms of the Zelda series, the incredible freedom that this game offers you and how well that's been received … to me, it means that freedom, that level of freedom is something that needs to be maintained in Zelda games going forward. My eyes have been opened to how important that is.

So one of the things that we definitely consider is that we always wanted to make sure the player could understand what their challenges or what their hurdle is. We always wanted to make sure the challenge could be challenged. So we always wanted to make a linear way of [overcoming] a hurdle.

So for example, if there was like, 'you can't do this because you don't have the right tools' or 'you don't meet the certain requirements,' players are going to not want to do that anymore. So we wanted to very much incorporate that."

The open world nature of the latest Zelda title is what drew a lot of gamers in, was even a deciding factor in many of us purchasing the latest console to begin with. Whatever the team decides for the future, we are here for it!

(via IGN)

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